After years of sharing a dial-up connection with my wife, I fell for a promotional ad for Earthlink's DSL service. What an exercise in frustration that was! Without going into all the gory details, suffice it to say that I spent a total of eight hours on the phone with six technicians (and one arrogant "master" technician) from Earthlink, and none of them could offer any constructive clues to get me connected. One tech offered to send a replacement modem (which I was to pay for!).

This morning I cancelled the service, and arranged to send back the modem for a refund (this phone call took a half-hour during which I was subjected to repeated pleas to call their technical support again, and to sell me additional products).

My question is-- is this typical? Who can I turn to for reliable service without all this hassle?

Check out WildBlue satellite service. Not as fast as DSL, but LOADS faster than dialup. My experience with the installation was seamless. $50/month (approx) and a $300 up front equipment and installation charge. See www.wildblue.com

not sure of your telco provider, see what promos are available for your area,

most have website to see if service is available and that gets you started. final word is afterthey check the circuit(s) to your qth.

I just changed from a dial up to adsl, now the family can share my connection on their own computers.

you'll get the dsl modem free with a rebate most of the time so your net cost is zero for equipment.

then add a Wireless-G Broadband Router - WRT54G by linksys, this will give you wifi in the home and add a firewall to your home network all in one box, easy to setup and be up and running fast. about $ 50 or so at walmart, etc.

Thanks to all for the comments and suggestions. I found that I am not alone by doing a google search on "earthlink sucks." It was amazing what came up, including a web site that someone has put up by that very name!

Look into cable internet, it's a lot faster and cheaper. If you add up the prices of services (~$20 for the phone line, and ~$50 for the DSL subscription) and compare them to cable (~$10 for BASIC TV service, ~$30 for VoIP phone and ~$40 for high-speed internet) you can see what's best for you. Cable speeds are much higher, I get 5MBs through cable and it's more bandwidth then I'd ever need, but it cuts right through on Linux ISO's and makes Echolink/realtime voice flawless.

Do NOT get satelite internet if you plan on doing anything other than web surfing and email. You cannot do any P2P sharing, you cannot download more that 250MB in a 4hr window or you get knocked back to 56k speed. I have hughesnet, and for me it blows chunks. No gaming, no downloading, horrific telnet/SSH, cant telecommute..but I sure can snipe ebay auctions and download spam email like nobody's business!

Perhaps I've just been lucky, but my experience with Earthlink DSL has been very good. The installer, unlike cable TV installers I've seen, was a senior in the Electrical Engineering program at NC State. He quickly had the service up and running and I've had only one 2 hour outage in 8 months. On the other hand, I signed up for the Earthlink DSL service through Sprint (our local telephone provider) and they promised me the service for $24.95. When the first bill came, it was for $39.95. After a few arguments with them, they gave up and sent me to Earthlink, who reduced the price to $29.95. Sprint (now Embarq) continues to run the ads locally for their $24.94-for-life price, but you can get that price only by buying an array of overpriced telephone add-on features.

Regardless of who the ISP is, the DSL service itself is provided by your local phone company. I've set up a number of Verizon DSL services for friends and family. In most cases there was no problem. When I did have a problem however, I got the run-around because Verizon provides the DSL and a different part of Verizon provides the ISP services. Whoever you are talking to at the moment automatically assumes that the problem must be on the other side. You get a clue when they give you two different trouble numbers to call, one for phone service and one for DSL service.

I have used only cable for the last 4 years. Blows DSL away! A coworker has DSL at home. I can login to our company website, do my dayly paperwork and be done before he gets to the login page. And its not a matter of his DSL not working right, because it does. Its that cable is so much faster! Heck there are times when he calls me to close his work orders while he tells me what was done over the nextel! Forget DSL or Sat. get cable....

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